Hierarchization and Integration of IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499 for Enhanced Reusability

Today's markets are short-lived and volatile. The producing industry needs to be able to react fast and cost-effective to product and process changes. Following the trend of Industry 4.0, current automation systems are designed as Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS), which main properties are the distribution of capabilities and strict modularization to enhance reuse of off-the-shelf automation components. The currently dominant Programmable Logic Controller programming standard IEC 61131 was conceived with mainly centralistic systems in mind, which limits its use for nowadays CPPS scenarios. Focusing on the software aspect, the contribution of this work is an enhanced hierarchic development approach for automation systems, which aims to decouple all hardware from the control flow logic of an automation system for combined IEC 61131 and IEC 61499 systems. Therefore, a migration path for IEC 61131 Function Blocks into the development model of the event-driven IEC 61499 is presented, and issues are discussed. Both approaches pay special attention to the reusability of software.